To Live

Synopsis

China, 1947. Fugui (Ge You), a wealthy merchant's son determines to
squander his father's fortune at the local casino tables. As well as losing
his inheritance and palatial home, his young wife, Jaizhen (Gong Li),
leaves him taking their infant son with her.

With nothing more to lose, Fugui, now scraping a meagre living in a shadow
puppet theatre, forswears gambling and, strictly on his wife's terms,
is reunited with his family. Zhang Yimou's film chronicles the next 30
years as the family, buffeted from civil war between Chiang Kai-Shek's
nationalists and Mao Zedong's communists to the great leap forward and
the cultural revolution, merely want to live. .

* * * * * *

Zhang Yimou brings China's recent history vividly to life by showing
the effect that political events of seismic proportion, too vast to pour
endlessly across the screen, have on the domestic minutiae of one family.
Earning a living and raising children become heroic struggles.

However, despite everything the human will to go on, to make a better
life, remains intact. As Zhang Yimou wrote in the 1994 Cannes Film Festival
programme, "Millions of Chinese families have undergone a turbulent half-century
of exceptional hardship. We can attribute their survival to their resilience
and their will to live and to a fundamentally optimistic attitude that
informs every aspect of the way they live their lives. To be forever hopeful
in the face of difficulties and hardships , is what living is all about."